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RT (blog) Federal review stalled after finding forensic errors by FBI lab unit spanned ... Washington Post Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of pr...

FBI terrorists among us: the 1993 WTC Bombing

FBI terrorists among us: 1993 WTC BombingThe mind-boggling role of the Bureauby Jon RappoportJuly 29, 2014www.nomorefakenews.com
There seems to be a rule: if a terror attack takes place and the FBI investigates it, things are never what they seem.
Federal attorney Andrew C McCarthy prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing case. A review of his book, Willful Blindness, states:
“For the first time, McCarthy intimately reveals the real story behind the FBI’s inability to stop the first World Trade Center bombing even though the bureau had an undercover informant in the operation — the jihadists’ supposed bombmaker.
“In the first sentence of his hard-hitting account, the author sums up the lawyerly — but staggeringly incomprehensive — reason why the FBI pulled its informant out of the terrorist group even as plans were coming to a head on a major attack:
“’Think of the liability!’
“The first rule for government attorneys in counterintelligence in the 1990s was, McCarthy tells us, ‘Avoid accountable failure.’ Thus, when the situation demanded action, the feds copped a CYA posture, the first refuge of the bureaucrat.”
That’s a titanic accusation, coming from a former federal prosecutor...

Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI lab has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency, government officials said.

The findings troubled the bureau, and it stopped the review of convictions last August. Case reviews resumed this month at the order of the Justice Department, the officials said.

U.S. officials began the inquiry after The Washington Post reported two years ago that flawed forensic evidence involving microscopic hair matches might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people. Most of those defendants never were told of the problems in their cases.

The inquiry includes 2,600 convictions and 45 death-row cases from the 1980s and 1990s in which the FBI’s hair and fiber unit reported a match to a crime-scene sample before DNA testing of hair became common. The FBI had reviewed about 160 cases before it stopped, officials said.

The investigation resumed after the Justice Department’s inspector general excoriated the department and the FBI for unacceptable delays and inadequate investigation in a separate inquiry from the mid-1990s. The inspector general found in that probe that three defendants were executed and a fourth died on death row in the five years it took officials to reexamine 60 death-row convictions that were potentially tainted by agent misconduct, mostly involving the same FBI hair and fiber analysis unit now under scrutiny.

“I don’t know whether history is repeating itself, but clearly the [latest] report doesn’t give anyone a sense of confidence that the work of the examiners whose conduct was first publicly questioned in 1997 was reviewed as diligently and promptly as it needed to be,” said Michael R. Bromwich, who was inspector general from 1994 to 1999 and is now a partner at the Goodwin Procter law firm.

Bromwich would not discuss any aspect of the current review because he is a pro bono adviser to the Innocence Project, which along with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is assisting the government effort under an agreement not to talk about the review. Still, he added, “Now we are left 18 years [later] with a very unhappy, unsatisfying and disquieting situation, which is far harder to remedy than if the problems had been addressed promptly.”

Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole this month ordered that reviews resume under the original terms, officials said.

According to the FBI, the delay resulted, in part, “from a vigorous debate that occurred within the FBI and DOJ about the appropriate scientific standards we should apply when reviewing FBI lab examiner testimony — many years after the fact.”

“Working closely with DOJ, we have resolved those issues and are moving forward with the transcript review for the remaining cases,” the FBI said.

Emily Pierce, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said: “The Department of Justice never signed off on the FBI’s decision to change the way they reviewed the hair analysis. We are pleased that the review has resumed and that notification letters will be going out in the next few weeks.”

During the review’s 11-month hiatus, Florida’s Supreme Court denied an appeal by a death-row inmate who challenged his 1988 conviction based on an FBI hair match. James Aren Duckett’s results were caught up in the delay, and his legal options are now more limited.

Revelations that the government’s largest post-conviction review of forensic evidence has found widespread problems counter earlier FBI claims that a single rogue examiner was at fault. Instead, they feed a growing debate over how the U.S. justice system addresses systematic weaknesses in past forensic testimony and methods.

“I see this as a tip-of-the-iceberg problem,” said Erin Murphy, a New York University law professor and expert on modern scientific evidence.

“It’s not as though this is one bad apple or even that this is one bad-apple discipline,” she said. “There is a long list of disciplines that have exhibited problems, where if you opened up cases you’d see the same kinds of overstated claims and unfounded statements.”

Worries about the limitations and presentation of scientific evidence are “coming out of the dark shadows of the legal system,” said David H. Kaye, a law professor at Penn State who helped lead a Justice Department-funded study of fingerprint analysis and testimony in 2012. “The question is: What can you do about it?”

Courts and law enforcement authorities have been reluctant to allow defendants to retroactively challenge old evidence using newer, more accurate scientific methods.

The Justice Department and FBI inquiry, which examines convictions before 2000, could provide a way for defendants to make that challenge. Because the government is dropping procedural objections to appeals and offering new DNA testing in flawed cases if sought by a judge or prosecutor, results could provide a measure of the frequency of wrongful convictions.

Responding to the FBI review, the accreditation arm of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors last year recommended that labs determine whether they needed to conduct similar reviews, and New York, North Carolina and Texas are doing so.

According to a Justice Department spokesman, officials last August completed reviews and notified a first wave of defendants in 23 cases, including 14 death-penalty cases, that FBI examiners “exceeded the limits of science” when they linked hair to crime-scene evidence.

However, concerned that errors were found in the “vast majority” of cases, the FBI restarted the review, grinding the process to a halt, said a government official who was briefed on the process. The Justice Department objected in January, but a standoff went unresolved until this month.

After more than two years, the review will have addressed about 10 percent of the 2,600 questioned convictions and perhaps two-thirds of questioned death-row cases.

The department is notifying defendants about errors in two more death-penalty cases and in 134 non-capital cases over the next month, and will complete evaluations of 98 other cases by early October, including 14 more death-penalty cases.

No crime lab performed more hair examinations for federal and state agencies than the 10-member FBI unit, which testified in cases nationwide involving murder, rape and other violent felonies.

Although FBI policy has stated since at least the 1970s that a hair association cannot be used as positive identification, like fingerprints, agents regularly testified to the near-certainty of matches.

In reality, there is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same. The FBI now uses visual hair comparison to rule out someone as a possible source of hair or as a screening step before more accurate DNA testing.

This month, the inspector general reported that inattention and foot-dragging by the Justice Department and the FBI led them to ignore warnings 15 years ago that scientifically unsupported and misleading testimony could have come from more than a single hair examiner among agents discredited in a 1997 inspector general’s report on misconduct at the FBI lab.

The report said that as of 1999, Justice Department officials had enough information to review all hair unit cases — not just those of former agent Michael P. Malone, who was identified as the agent making the most frequent exaggerated testimony.

By 2002, Maureen Killion, then director of enforcement operations, had alerted senior criminal division officials to “the specter that the other examiners in the unit” were as sloppy as Malone, the inspector general said.

“This issue has been raised with the FBI but not resolved to date,” Killion wrote to then-Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff and his principal deputy, John C. Keeney, in July 2002, the report said.

Twelve years later, the Florida case shows the continued inadequacy of officials’ response.

Duckett, then a rookie police officer in Mascotte, Fla., was convicted of raping and strangling Teresa McAbee, 11, and dumping her into a lake in 1987.

After a state police examiner was unable to match pubic hair found in the victim’s underwear, prosecutors went to Malone, who testified at trial that there was a “high degree of probability” that the hair came from Duckett.

Such testimony is scientifically invalid, according to the parameters of the current FBI review, because it claims to associate a hair with a single person “to the exclusion of all others.”

The Florida court denied Duckett’s request for a new hearing on Malone’s hair match. The court noted that there was other evidence of Duckett’s guilt and that the FBI had not entirely abandoned visual hair comparison...

"The West also should not shrink from the destabilization of Mr. Putin’s regime. Once considered a partner, this Kremlin ruler has evolved into a dangerous rogue who threatens the stability and peace of Europe. If he can be undermined through sanctions and the restoration of order in eastern Ukraine, he should be."

"Russia still has the opportunity to choose the path of de-escalation, which would lead to the removal of these sanctions," the seven nations said in a statement. "If it does not do so, however, we remain ready to further intensify the costs of its adverse actions."

They called for a cease-fire and pushed Russia to use its influence with the separatists to secure the Ukraine-Russia border — a plea that has been made for months.

The group is made up of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom.

It expelled Russia for the G-8 earlier this year after its interference in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea in March.

The United States and the European Union on Tuesday imposed additional sanctions on the country for its continued support of the separatists, who have been blamed for shooting down the commercial airliner that killed all 298 people on board.

The U.S. sanctions targeted a number of state-owned banks and a Russian shipbuilding company. They also placed export restrictions on the energy industry for future exploration.

"This terrible event should have marked a watershed in this conflict, causing Russia to suspend its support for illegal armed groups in Ukraine, secure its border with Ukraine, and stop the increasing flow of weapons, equipment, and militants across the border in order to achieve rapid and tangible results in de-escalation," according to the statement. "Regrettably, however, Russia has not changed course."

The nations again called for an unimpeded international investigation of the crash site, which has been approved by the U.N. Security Council, including Russia.

»Ukraine halts offensive - iAfrica.com31/07/14 11:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from Group of Seven - Google News. Ukraine halts offensive iAfrica.com International fallout from the crisis tearing apart the ex-Soviet nation rumbled on as the Group of Seven major developed economies warned ...

»Rep. McCaul: This is a new Cold War31/07/14 10:31 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from Uploads by CNNInternational. Rep. McCaul: This is a new Cold War Wolf Blitzer speaks with Rep. Mike McCaul about his views on how the U.S. is handling Russia with regards to Ukraine. From: CNNInternational...

»Experts Reach Ukraine Crash Site31/07/14 10:11 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from Voice of America. An international team of experts has reached the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine for the first time, after days of attempts foiled by violence in the separati...

»Monitors reach MH17 crash site31/07/14 09:33 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from CNN.com - World. International monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe reached the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash site on Thursday for the first time in almost a week, the...

»House approves lawsuit against Obama30/07/14 21:42 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from Uploads by CNNInternational. House approves lawsuit against Obama The Republican-led house approved a resolution that would authorize Speaker John Boehner to sue President Obama. From: CNNInternational Vie...

»Kiev Faces Donetsk Battle30/07/14 12:45 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from WSJ.com: What's News Europe. As the Ukrainian army tightens its grip around Donetsk, the government could soon face the prospect of urban warfare in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.

»Krauthammer: The vacant presidency30/07/14 12:44 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from Opinions: Washington Post Opinion, Editorial, Op Ed, Politics Editorials - The Washington Post. The president’s demeanor is worrying a lot of people. From the immigration crisis on the Mexican border to th...

»Belarus to host Ukraine crisis talks30/07/14 12:35 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from Russia | The Guardian. President Petro Poroshenko wants discussions with Russia and OSCE to focus on securing access to MH17 crash site Belarus is to host talks between Ukraine, Russia and OSCE representat...

»A United EU against Russia30/07/14 12:35 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from EU-RussiaCentre. Enfin. Endlich. Finally the EU has defied its critics and shown that it can agree on a tough and united position against Russia. After a lengthy meeting yesterday the EU agreed to impose s...

»Jones: No to Obama lawsuit - The Hill30/07/14 11:46 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. The Hill Jones: No to Obama lawsuit The Hill A Republican congressman opposes legislation that would authorize a lawsuit against President Obama for his executive actions. Rep. W...

»Battles near MH17 crash site30/07/14 11:12 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from Uploads by CNNInternational. Battles near MH17 crash site Investigators were again blocked from reaching the MH17 crash site because of fighting. Nick Paton Walsh reports. From: CNNInternational Views: 0 0...

»Obama Names New Ambassador to Russia30/07/14 10:35 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from Voice of America. President Barack Obama has named veteran diplomat and Eastern European expert John Tefft as the new ambassador to Russia. Tefft is long experienced in diplomatic circles within the former...

»Banks Ready Plan To Aid Argentina30/07/14 10:06 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinksmikenova shared this story from WSJ.com: World News. Members of Argentina's banking association, known as Adeba, are working on a last-minute plan to help the country avoid default, according to people familiar with the idea.

Omar Mateen and 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting - The Dots, The Darkness, and The Mirrors, part 2

Quotes and Questions for Investigations

THE DARKNESS OF THE LOWLY TRUTHS

9/11 and Russia – connecting the dots - by Michael Novakhov

FBI on a couch: problems and solutions: FBI as a domestic intelligence service

The American KGB and the Comey's visions: can Hoover's COINTELPRO thugs be transformed into the modern counterintelligence officers? | M.N.: The American KGB wants to take over the US government. Oy, gevalt! Maybe, it is the time to order a ticket to Madagascar.. - Quotes and Comments

What is wrong with the FBI?

The Kiryas Joel affair: "Sexual abuse" or FBI abuse? | Michael Ameri's suicide as a protest against the FBI: What is wrong with the FBI: its strategy, tactics, techniques and methods if they lead to these unexpected and tragic results?

Kiryas Joel: "Sexual abuse" or FBI abuse?

Is there a general attempt to mislead and to manipulate the FBI using the issues of sexual abuse as a pretext, as a way to deal with the political and other opponents?

Investigate the "investigators"! Part 2: FBI as "a high church for the true mediocre"

Investigate the "investigators"! FBI as "a high church for the true mediocre"

"At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre." Norman Mailer | "Investigate the "investigators"! I would think that no less than 50% of the problems this country is facing is due to the FBI's inadequacy. This is a very important issue and the time has come to address it." - by Michael Novakhov